final coil of bahamut

Some Personal Stuff

I feel like it has been pretty noticeable that I have been in a bit of a funk for the last few weeks. When this happens I tend to extract myself from the world until the passes, which isn’t necessarily the smartest thing that I can do. However over the years I have done this as my coping mechanism, because I am always afraid I will snap at someone when I get moody. For a bit yesterday I was wondering if my magical happy pills were not longer working, but then my wife asked me something. Was my low as low as it has been in the past… and to be honest no. Normally the world would be crushingly oppressive, and instead I just felt sort of permanently bummed out. So I guess maybe things are working just fine, they are just filling in the valleys so that the lows are quite as low as they would have been otherwise.

Yesterday was one of the more stressful days that I have had in awhile. We had someone patch a server and due to a conflict between the Windows Update Service and MacAfee that we have seen numerous times now… it caused a process deadlock that ended up taking down production services for hours. This was stressful in so many ways, because while there was nothing I did to cause it… there was also nothing I could really do to help it either. It was another department with another manager… and another set of priorities responsible for the fault and the fix. So when I came home… I was at an extremely low point. However my wife and I went out to dinner, and then as the evening went on I started to feel better about the world. It was like peeking out of a fog to see a lovely day behind it. I guess in the grand scheme of things… if all of my low spots are like this from now on… I will count myself lucky because while it sucked, it was manageable.

Bahamut Is Down

One of the struggles in game is that I feel like I am caught between two worlds a bit. It has taken longer than I expected to get the Monday night raid group pieced together and ready to do Heavensward content. As a result we have been focusing on trying to get through the Final Coil of Bahamut, and made some significant progress. Last week we were just shy of forming a group, so going into Turn 13 last night… we were all rusty. However it feels like we got our bearings more quickly than normal and made a few adjustments. Previously I had been tanking Bahamut at the twelve o’clock position which seems the most obvious place to drag him as you are running in… and do the traditional drag the boss while running thing. Instead we swapped things up and I drug up back to the six o’clock position we entered the room at. This allowed Ashgar to pick up the adds significantly easier and also allowed the DPS to burn them down faster.

The real challenge however was like always… we suck at dive bomb phases. However in spite of the fact that you ultimately have to deal with something like five divebomb phases, they seemed to come together more smoothly than we were used to. Essentially you have to find Bahamut, and move out of the way while also moving out of the way of Twintania that comes barreling through immediately after him. I think we only made it through two or three of these phases completely clean, however we did manage to rez the few players that got pushed into a wall. I am constantly impressed at still how difficult of a fight this is. Sure this is expansion old content at this point, but I am damned happy to be able to say I have defeated Bahamut, and I have a title and a minion to show for it. Paragon to a really spiffy White Mage Cane as a result, and part of me wants to try and muster the troops to do this more often so that we can farm the really awesome weapons for folks. I have to say… the most stressed I have ever been in Final Fantasy XIV is trying to find a way to survive Ahk Mourn. On the positive side… Alexander turn 3 has caused me to get really good at timing Holmgang.

Alex Finally

Last night was a significant night because not only did it see us beating Turn 13 of Final Coil of Bahamut… but it also saw us officially starting this expansions raid content as a group. I love the Wednesday night group, and I am enjoying what is happening there… but there is something extra special about getting the Monday night group into Alexander. While Kodra, Grace and I are parts of both teams, there will always be something special about my first Final Fantasy XIV raid group. So it makes me happy that this week everyone was up to 170 and several were considerably beyond that… even though it took a little bit of cheatery to get Ash’s paladin in the zone by wearing some strength jewelry. We only really had time to do turn one of Alexander, but we came really damned close to oneshotting it. Had we not started freaking out because we thought we were coming up against the hard enrage… we absolutely would have downed it in the first try.

On the second attempt everyone felt more confident and we pushed the dps so much harder than before. The awesome thing about coming in on a Monday is that several of us were already capped on Alexander pieces for the week which meant pretty much all of the newish folks walked away with something spiffy. I look forward to coming in next Monday and clearing all four turns of Alexander, and getting everyone their freebie accessories. From there maybe some Bismarck and Ravana? It makes me happy to feel like I am making forward momentum with both teams. The only thing that frustrates me a little bit is that I feel like we should go back and do Turn 8, which is the turn that Monday night skipped to start work on Turn 9. So maybe next week I can talk people into doing that so that we finally can close the book on the Coil of Bahamut. I don’t want to sacrifice getting people through Alexander for it, but I would love to be able to say I have beaten each of the turns. All in all it was a pretty great night, not just for the raid victories but for also clearing away the fog that I have been dwelling in.

Blaugust Clarifications

Yesterday I had a handful of questions about Blaugust that I thought I should address this morning, just in case anyone else had it. Firstly it is absolutely okay to write content ahead of time and stage it to release over the course of the month. With both Pax Prime and Gamescom happening during the month of August, this is more than likely going to cut into some writers schedules. I know last year there were several folks doing great… and then they went to Gamescom and dropped off the face of the planet. Being able to cover schedule irregularities is a necessary coping skill to deal with keeping a schedule. While I personally prefer not to schedule posts ahead of time, quite literally everyone else does this. So for the purpose of Blaugust this still absolutely counts towards your thirty one posts.

Another question that I had is whether or not it is cool to tell a story in thirty one parts. This is also absolutely fine, and like I said yesterday this is a challenge about longevity and regularity… not necessarily what you are writing about. A prime example of this is during my NaNoWriMo run in 2013… I knew that I could not do it and blog at the same time. So instead I just posted my nightly words each day as my blog post. So over the course of the month I essentially broadcast the draft of my story to the world. In the case of the person who asked me yesterday, they wanted to write the back story of their primary game character over the course of the month. That seems completely valid, and at the same time something that would be extremely awesome. The constraints of this contest are about producing thirty one posts during the month, and so long as those posts mean the constraints of the challenge you are doing just fine.

A Small Patch

I have a good friend Rylacus who is going to be starting Final Fantasy XIV soon. Over the year plus I have been contiguously playing this game I have talked to him about the patching schedule. I mentioned that about once a quarter we get a big patch, and usually more than once a month we get little minor patches. The problem being that he had no real frame of reference as to what I meant by those two things. Yesterday 3.0.5 was released and this is absolutely what I would call a “small patch” by FFXIV standards. When I linked him the patch notes he was completely floored by the fact that we call that a minor patch. A lot of things happened yesterday, not the least of which is the introduction of the Esoterics tier of Tomestones. I keep thinking at some point they are going to run out of goofy names to call these, but they seem to have a limitless fount of them. This allows players to purchase item level 200 items, and returns us to the state of the weekly tomestone cap of 450. The weapons once again are priced just enough to force players to hit that cap three weeks in a row to get them.

Yesterday was also another significant moment for me and my Warrior as I finished upgrading all of my gear to level 180 (other than the Alexander ring that I should be getting tonight… ). This means I am essentially “done” gearing with Law and can now start diverting that to my Dragoon who is roughly halfway to level 58. I was reaching this point where running dungeons was not nearly as important for me as it had been in the past, and then bam… a small patch releases and once again I am infused with this desire to hit the dungeons every single day. This time around Expert Roulette is going to be my key focus, and we have learned in the past that through running a single roulette every day for several days in a row.. you can cap your tomestones without doing anything terribly insane. What I marvel at however is the timing of their content. Quite literally just as we started slowing down our dungeon running fervor… they launched yet another tier of gear giving us even more reason to get excited about running dungeons again. This game is absolutely phenomenal at figuring out the right mix of carrot and stick.

Final Coil

Another huge thing yesterday is that Savage Alexander opened and now the bleeding edge of Final Fantasy XIV raiders can throw themselves against that content. As of this morning it seems like only a handful of free companies have defeated the first turn, and only one or two have managed to defeat the second. So it seems like it will take folks a good deal of time to actually conquer this raid. For our guild however, we are still very much in the gearing process and have yet to be able to field a reliable “normal” Alexander run on a regular basis. What our Monday night group has been working on instead is finishing out the Final Coil of Bahamut. I realize we are quite literally “months behind” as the saying goes, but I am still very much enjoying myself. We managed to take down Turn 12 on Monday night and made what I feel is significant progress on Turn 13. Ultimately it will probably take us a few more weeks, which is good… because we still only have one geared tank for the Monday raid.

As a result… I ended up solo tanking turn 13… which is quite possibly the most hectic thing I have done in a long time. My world became entirely centered around making sure I had five stacks of wrath at the right moment… so I could hit Inner Beast plus another cooldown… in order to survive the tankbuster… which of note means that it literally does enough damage to decimate my 25,000 hit points. The worst timing however was on the pull when quite literally I was hitting my fifth ability and gaining my fifth stack of wrath… as the attack was casting that I needed Inner Beast for. Needless to say that night stressed me the hell out… but hopefully we can down him soon. I would love if the axe dropped, because it is super amazing looking. What I really hope however is that we can finish gearing and start work on Bismarck Extreme, Ravana Extreme and Alexander for gear.

Missing Tank

Last night was our raid night for the group that meets on Mondays in Final Fantasy XIV. Initially there was talk of working on Bismarck Ex but since we only have one geared tank in that team, that was out of the question. Ashgar decided to level his monk first, and is now working on bringing the Paladin online once more. The amount of time he has had to work over the last few weeks has slowed down his leveling process, and you can tell he is more than a bit frustrated by it. In any case that left us with one max level geared tank and one partially leveled tank to play with. Since the elemental snakes will one shot the tank if he has the wrong buff color… that took Bismarck Ex completely off the table. So as a result we opted to venture forth into the Final Coil of Bahamut, an area that we unlocked last week but had yet to attempt.

One of the constant themes of the Heavensward expansion is the fact that the Allagan’s are jerks and seem to like playing god. The story behind the Final Coil of Bahamut seems to reflect this. Not going to go into any massive spoilers, but I highly suggest you run through this content at some point so you can see the story bits yourself. The other big surprise is the fact that we did in fact have to deal with a lot of mechanics. We went into this place as a “undersized party” which is the lamest way of saying “let me go into it without level syncing me down”. This is a great option for farming older content by yourself, for example I have been slowly working on getting the rest of my Brayflox Infantry set for example doing this. For the older raids this means you can go in and have a bit more padding to deal with the damage these deal. We pulled turn 10 completely blind, and managed to make some significant progress before ultimately wiping… and having to learn the mechanics of the fight.

Final Coil of Bahamut

Throughout the course of the night we managed to take down turn 10, and after a bit of futzing turn 11 as well. We entered turn 12… mainly because there is a huge amount of story content at the beginning of it. We made a couple of attempts and agreed that we would simply return next week after doing a bit of studying. I realize we are not doing this content “for real” by any stretch of the imagination… but it still feels very epic. Everything about these zones and fights are just amazing to behold. There is an awesome jumping sequence where you go flying through the air… and I am sure it is enough to make anyone with either motion sickness or a fear of heights squeamish. I sometimes suffer from vertigo in games, but this actually didn’t seem to bother me too much, at least not in the same way that Razor’s Edge did.

Ultimately what I want to try and focus on instead however is gearing the folks that are sub 170. I want to do Alexander with my normal raid group, and I want to also tackle the two extreme fights. Unfortunately I am one of the few people on our team that I think is geared to that point. So that means I need to start grabbing folks and dragging them into dungeon runs for tomestones of law over the coming weeks. Basically I need to start seeing if people are already at 170 before running a dungeon… and then trying to grab folks that aren’t instead. Over the last few days I was in my own mad push for that gear level and kind of ignored everything but doing that. Now I feel like I need to take a much more structured approach in an attempt to get folks the gear they need to do the bigger and more exciting things.